I have 400+ hours in Skyrim. I've made two or three comprehensive playthroughs with different characters. At one point I had nearly a hundred mods adding new content, etc. I 100% achievements on Steam. I love Skyrim, it it probably Game of the Generation for me.

With that out of the way, the remaster bums me out in a few ways. There was a lot of potential that they didn't capitalize on, and the product just doesn't meet the level of quality that it should have, given that this is a 5 year old game.

1. There are lots of bugs in the engine that can't be fixed by mods. I'm not talking about quest or scripting bugs, but things like how the Key Bindings in the UI don't update if you change them (Seriously, I swapped the "raise/lower weapons" button with "go third person". Forever, it claims that "F" will favourite an item, but that will drop it instead). Or, how alt-tabbing is still wonky (granted, it's better than it used to be, since it doesn't cause the mouse to appear in game, but it's still a hassle).
2. The new mod launcher is... sub optimal. I use a password manager, but it would not let me copy the password I just created into the game, I had to type it out manually. Also, once you do that, the UI is awful for PC. I guess it's fine for controllers, but I don't use controllers for first person games, and I think most people would be fine using a mouse to navigate a reasonable interface in the rare cases that you're messing around with mods, and switching to controller once you're starting to play.
3. They disable achievements when using mods. This is particularly strange, since they had to go out of their way to do this. And, I haven't checked, but I bet the console commands to unlock achievements still works. I mean, I guess I don't care since I got 100% on the original version, and nothing material has changed for the remaster, but it's still weird.
4. They changed the save format. I don't care about importing my old saves, but I have a few half-baked external tools (that may some day see the light of day) that are broken now because the save version bumped from 9 to 12.

I guess that none of this makes the game worse, which is good. Thankfully, they did improve some things!

1. The game hasn't crashed at all for me. Granted, I only have a handful of mods currently, but here's hoping that going forward things are better!
2. They guarantee that everyone has all the DLC. This is good for mods, as well as players, since you get 1 Unoffical patch instead of 17.
3. Alt-tabbing is functional, and no longer causes the mouse cursor to appear in game. This was probably the most frustrating bug from the original version.
4. The new shaders and stuff look really nice. Although, the new god rays seem to be highlighting a severe smog problem in Tamriel. But, boy does it look nice while you're coughing up a lung.

These all seem like minor points, having outlined them so, but whatever, it's basically a free update for me, so I wasn't expecting anything earth shaking or anything.

You can use the nexus mod manager instead of that horrible built in atrocity, way better.

Plus there's already a way to bypass the stupid achievement restriction thing http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/245/?

I myself am just waiting for flawless wide-screen support so I can play in ultrawide, you can actually force a resolution via .INI files already, but then it messes up that crappy UI this game has...

I'll also add the compressed sound issue, but it sounds like that'll be fixed sometime this week. The other big issue I'd point out is the lack of SKSE and SkyUI. It sounds like the SkyUI devs would rather pass on the the torch for a Special Edition version than create it themselves.

That being said, I'm so excited to play Skyrim again!

Yep I'm on Xbox and have multiple miscellaneous quests I can't complete because the NPC scripting is broken. One has the NPC marked as UNDER a dungeon. Another says the NPC is in Whiterun, I go in and the icon marker points to the grate that the little stream you walk over when you enter flows into. Oh and that NPC is one of the companions so I can't continue that quest line until he comes back.

Obsidian made it so that using the command console in New Vegas disabled the achievements (for the current session). I didn't know about it at the time but it explains why I don't have most of them because I was constantly having to noclip my way out of glitches.

Ugh, that default interface. Without SkyUI support, I can't even be bothered to install SE.

That was a big one for me too. I was looking at getting this, but I'm so used to Skyrim being modded like crazy that I'd rather just play that. SkyUI is amazing, and with all the graphical mods I have, it looks pretty close to as good as this. Not quite as good obviously, but pretty good.

I honestly don't understand this. You said you had over 100 mods when you put 400 hours into Skyrim and then you go on to complain about Special Edition's shortcomings for which there are mods...?

By the way you describe it, I'm going to assume you used Workshop with original Skyrim to apply mods, which is why you're having issues now. While Workshop is/was decent, NMM is/was/always will be better and therefor the way to go about installing mods. Every complaint you have is already addressed. You can enable achievements when playing with mods, you can install other UI's for item browsing and more. Obviously, since mods have to be ported and this has been out for a few days, it's still a bit bare bones mod-wise. But the most important ones are already here.

@zevvion: i believe his gripe is the fact he still needs mods to fix things in a supposed upgraded version of the game.

Anyway seems like a waste for anybody who owns this already but decent for those who never played it.

@oursin_360: It's free though. That's not really a waste in any way. Yes, original Skyrim with mods could look pretty damn good and still looks better in some aspects than this remaster, but overall this remaster definitely looks better so the ceiling for visual mods also went up a lot. It is indeed too bad a lot of it is left up to mods instead of there from the offset, but these games are meant to be played with mods anyway so installing a couple more is practically not that different.